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Nerf Heirlooms!

I love heirlooms. They make leveling alts so much more fun, I considered the chest and shoulders mandatory for an alt and a weapon almost mandatory, until we rolled alts over on Argent Dawn to join Single Abstract Noun. Now I know that heirlooms are threatening the game and need nerfing, fast.

Why do I say that? It’s not the XP boost, actually; I miss it dreadfully but I can live with the only-slightly-less breakneck pace of leveling that we have these days. Let me relate a little story first.

Analogue the Druid went into Deadmines with three others from SAN; Reversion the Rogue, and a warlock and druid. The other druid wanted to heal so in the interest of a fast queue, I signed in as a tank. I had never bear tanked before (except dropping into bear to growl quest mobs off other people) but I’m a pretty good tank these days, so I didn’t think it would be too hard.

As expected, we wiped a lot; we were low level for the instance and lost three random dpsers before we finally decided to just to finish 4 man. I kept aggro, mostly, things died, mostly, I stayed alive, mostly. All four of us were on a pretty similar level for gear and power, and we had fun. It ended with most of us dead, Van Cleef dead, and too many respawns to run back for his head, but oh well.

After that I got on Annalogue the Paladin, who like Analogue the Druid was 17, and queued up to tank. The first run was a Ragefire Chasm ten minute affair that left a bad taste in my mouth due to a jerk of a hunter who tried to wipe us twice and then took the tank sword from the boss, so I queued again and got Wailing Caverns and the Twinks of Doom.

A Rogue and a Priest (the healer) both four levels higher than me and wearing at least five heirlooms each (priest had both trinkets, rogue had two daggers). And so began my hour and a half of being useless.

It didn’t help that I don’t know that instance; I had to let the priest take the lead. But even when it came to fights, I could not hold or get aggo. The rogue did – literally – close to three times as much damage as I did. I didn’t have any aoes yet, which was bad enough, but the priest kept running over and aggroing more groups and bringing them to us to kill. And I couldn’t call the pair out over this behavior, because their gear allowed them to act with impunity. The healer stopped to drink twice. We wiped once, when someone else aggroed a group and we got too many sleeps cast on the healer. The rogue ended up doing over 50% of the overall damage. I relegated myself to keeping whatever mobs he wasn’t killing off the healer, occasionally taunting off him just to keep my hand in.

If I didn’t already have a max level paladin it would have been even worse. Those two could probably have two-manned the instance alone, and they knew it, and they let us know they knew it. The rest of us, dressed in quest rewards and random drops, were peons to their royalty.

If we could mail heirlooms across servers, I wouldn’t have had that problem, but what about brand new players, or anyone without a max level character to grind badges on? I don’t even remember what the other two players in that pug were, because they mattered so little. We were frustrated, useless, and bored. It’s not a good thing.

Blizzard needs to reduce the stats on heirlooms a lot. They should be fractionally better than the gear you’d naturally have at that level, not 3 times as good. Doing 10% more damage than anyone else? Fine. Doing triple damage? Not so good.

I will add that the level ranges for those dungeons doesn’t help; I was 17 and one of the other guys there was, I think, 25; hard to keep aggro off him at the best of times. But even so, it was the level 21 rogue in heirlooms that made life impossible for me.

This is not QQ; this is to point out a flaw that will only get worse as the game ages more. If Blizzard has given up on getting real new subscriptions, then it’s fine. Otherwise I think heirlooms may become a serious problem..

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5 Responses

Honestly, I don’t think it’s such a big problem… It might be bad at low levels, but as you progress the difference gets smaller. For my ~45 priests most gear in dungeons is either a bit better or a bit worse than my heirlooms – mostly worse, but not by much.

I hope that’s the case! I did notice the last time we ran anything on our heirloom-geared priest + warrior that you could tell which people had heirlooms because they’d top the damage charts, but it wasn’t quite as noticeable at 60.

Might be different for DPS… most of the chars I leveled in heirlooms have been dungeons tanks/healers, and while questing I didn’t have anything to compare my DPS to. I’d test out how I compare to the others in dungeons, but at this level queues are horrible even for healers, and I suck mightily at shadow, so it wouldn’t be a very useful experiment.

The addition of heirlooms had a negative effect on levelling a crafting profession. Some crafted items, which were Best In Slot for a number of levels (say Shining Silver Breastplate) are no longer selling and that’s not even speaking of the uncommon crafted chest pieces, shoulders, and weapons which are now obsolete.

I believe Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, and Tailoring are now professions for the rich because of it is very difficult to recover a significant portion of your costs when levelling these professions.

I believe the situation will only get worse in Cataclysm.

Although it does not affect me personally, it is sad newcomers do not have as many decent options as I did when I started playing.

I had not thought of this at all, but you’re very right. I guess it would pay to have an enchanter on hand to de them? Low level enchanting mats still sell ok on my server. Hope they do something about this come Cataclysm.